The Night Falling Read Online Free

setting such things by for when you have your own baby,’ says Ettore, and Pino grins. He longs for babies – a herd of them, a flock. How or whether they’ll all be fed is not something he lets worry him. He seems to think they’ll be self-sustaining, like hearth spirits or will-o’-the-wisps, like putti .
    ‘Iacopo will have outgrown them by then. I’m sure Paola will lend them back.’
    ‘Don’t be so sure.’
    ‘You mean she’ll want to keep them, to remember how little he was?’ says Pino. Ettore grunts. What he’d meant was that he’s not so certain Iacopo will outgrow the little things so soon. His nephew is reedy and too quiet. So many babies die. Ettore frets about him, frowns over him. Whenever Paola sees this she shoves him away, and curses. She thinks his anxiety will coalesce and bring some grim prophecy down on her son.
    The man from Masseria Vallarta takes a sheaf of paper from his pocket, unfolds it. The waiting men focus their attention on him, watching with steady expectation. It’s a strange ritual – the farm has a harvest to bring in and the men all know it, but even so, they do not trust the man. They do not trust that they will have work until they are standing in the field, working. They do not trust that they will be paid until the bailiff puts the coins into their hands the Saturday after. The overseer catches Ettore’s eye and gives him a hard stare. Ettore stares right back at him. He is a union man, and the overseer knows it; knows his name, and his face. Some have led the strikes and the demonstrations while the others followed, and Ettore is one of the first kind. Or he was – in the six months since he lost Livia he’s done nothing, said nothing; he’s worked with a steady, mindless rhythm, ignoring his hunger and his exhaustion. In all that time, he has spared not a single thought for the revolution, for his brothers, for the starving workers or the ever-present injustices, but the overseers don’t seem to have noticed his change of heart. The absence of his heart.
    So there’s a black mark by his name that nothing will shift, but he also works without pause, and attacks the ground with the heaviest mattock; he presents them with a conundrum: a troublemaker who works like a Trojan. The corporal with the white moustaches hires him with the merest nod of his head, marking down his name. Then he flicks his gnarled finger at the others he’s chosen, including Pino, and those men file away to begin the long walk to the farm. Valerio is not chosen. Years of wielding the mattock have shaped his spine, bending him like an overblown tree, and though he’s tried not to cough since they got to the piazza, you can see the effort of containing the spasms in the way his body clenches and shakes from time to time. He cut about half as much wheat as some of the other men yesterday, and the immovable overseer has an infallible memory for such things. Ettore grips his father’s shoulder in parting.
    ‘Go now to the shepherd, over there. Go now, before others take his lire,’ he says. Valerio nods.
    ‘Work hard, boy,’ he says, then gives in to his cough. Ettore doesn’t bother to reply. There is no other kind of work, after all.
    The sun is rising in a gentle riot of colour by the time they reach the farm. Pino turns his face to it for a minute, shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath, as though, like a plant, the sun will give him the energy to work that day. When the sky is alight like this Ettore thinks of Livia, shielding her black eyes with one hand. When it rains, he thinks of Livia squinting up at the clouds, and smiling as the water hits her skin. When it gets dark he thinks of the times they met beneath the arches of Gioia’s oldest streets, when they would know each other by touch and smell alone, and she would take his questing hand and kiss his fingertips, and send thumps of desire straight to his groin. He knows that his thoughts of her show on his face, and he can tell